Routes Roads And Landscapes

Routes and roads make their way into and across the landscape, defining it as landscape and making it accessible for many kinds of uses and perceptions. Bringing together outstanding scholars from cultural history, geography, philosophy, and a host of other disciplines, this collection examines the complex entanglement between routes and landscapes. It traces the changing conceptions of the landscape from the Enlightenment to the present day, looking at how movement has been facilitated, imagined and represented and how such movement, in turn, has conditioned understandings of the landscape. A particular focus is on the modern transportation landscape as it came into being with the canal, the railway, and the automobile. These modes of transport have had a profound impact on the perception and conceptualization of the modern landscape, a relationship investigated in detail by authors such as Gernot Böhme, Sarah Bonnemaison, Tim Cresswell, Finola O'Kane, Charlotte Klonk, Peter Merriman, Christine Macy, David Nye, Vittoria Di Palma, Charles Withers, and Thomas Zeller.

Experience Alberta's heritage and the outdoors in Country Roads of Alberta, an intriguing photographic guidebook that takes you to places off the beaten track. Alberta's scenery is as diverse as its topography. Fringed along its western edge by high mountains, the land descends through foothills to stretch into undulating plains sculpted by ancient ice into ridges, hills and deep coulees. Under the changing light of the prairie sky, the rolling landscape reveals tipi rings and medicine wheels—remnants of the first people to call this land home—as well as marks of later civilization: homesteads, old barns, churches and the graveyards of the first immigrants. Antelope, wild goats, moose, beaver, prairie dogs and birds are among the bountiful wildlife that flourishes here. In i>Country Roads of Alberta, Liz Bryan guides readers along the back roads of this beautiful landscape. In addition to driving directions and maps, Bryan includes snippets of archaeology, history, geology and other interesting information. Her magnificent, full-colour photos celebrate Alberta's many landscapes—some still wild, and all most beautiful.

The essays in this volume document trails, paths, and roads across different times and cultures, from those built by hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin of North America to causeway builders in the Bolivian Amazon to Bronze Age farms in the Near East, through aerial and satellite photography, surface survey, historical records, and excavation.

In British Columbia by the Road, Ben Bradley takes readers on an unprecedented journey through the history of roads, highways, and motoring in British Columbia’s Interior, a remote landscape composed of plateaus and interlocking valleys, soaring mountains and treacherous passes. Challenging the idea that the automobile offered travellers the freedom of the road and a view of unadulterated nature, Bradley shows that boosters, businessmen, conservationists, and public servants manipulated what drivers and passengers could and should view from the comfort of their vehicles. Although cars and roads promised freedom, they offered drivers a curated view of the landscape that shaped the province’s image in the eyes of residents and visitors alike.

As world powers realign their cultural, economic and political outlooks, there is no better time to consider how Afro-Eurasia's complex network of ancient trade routes - which spanned the vastness of the steppe, vertiginous mountain ranges, fertile river plains and forbidding deserts across the continents and on to the seas beyond - fostered economic activity and cultural, political and technological communication. From silk to slaves, fashion to music, religion to science the movement of interaction of goods, people and ideas was crucial to the flourishing of peoples and their cultures across this vast region. Edited by Susan Whitfield, an established authority on the subject, with contributions from over 80 leading scholars from across the globe, Silk Roads situates the ancient routes against the landscapes that defined them, to reveal the raw materials that they produced, the means of travel that were employed to traverse them and the communities that were shaped by them. Organized by terrain, from steppe to desert to ocean, each section includes detailed maps, a historical overview, thematic essays and features showcasing art, buildings and archaeological discoveries. A wealth of photographs reveals the breathtaking and often forbidding landscapes encountered by travellers and traders through the millennia. With one section inscribed as a World Heritage Corridor by UNESCO in 2014 and others to follow, and China claiming the Silk Roads as the precursor of its Belt Road Initiative, this network of ancient trade routes and the interaction along them has never been of greater interest or importance than today. This beautiful publication honours the astonishing diversity in the way cultures advance and flourish not in spite of their differences, but because of them.

The European Landscape Convention was adopted under the auspices of the Council of Europe with the aim of promoting the protection, management and planning of European landscape and organising European co-operation in this area. It is the first international treaty covering all aspects of landscape. It applies to the entire territory of the contracting parties and covers natural, rural, urban and peri-urban areas. It concerns landscapes that might be considered outstanding, commonplace or deteriorated. The convention represents an important contribution to achieving the Council of Europe's objectives, namely to promote democracy, human rights and the rule of law, as well as to seek common solutions to the main problems facing European society. By taking into account landscape, culture and nature, the Council of Europe seeks to protect the quality of life and well-being of Europeans in a sustainable development perspective.

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world. Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them. With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six of these key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity. A spirited, urgent book that reveals the costs and benefits of being connected—how, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.

Networks of roads and footpaths connect the historic sites and locate the traces of those that have sunk into oblivion. Fortified hilltop hamlets and market towns in the plains, upland farmsteads and agricultural estates, often of Roman origin, ancient churches and aristocratic villas, vineyards and olive groves, woods and orchards, pastures and farmland: a widespread culture of building and making. A kaleidoscope that the camera lens helps us to interpret and appreciate because, rather than a mere background for the selfie, the world is a reality to be explored and understood in the singularity of its numberless crossroads.